Luca

When Irvin saw the Pixar movie Luca, he thought it was an okay movie... and an excellent cosplay opportunity! Originally envisioning it for the Mermaid Parade, when that event got cancelled Irvin decided to make it his Halloween costume for the year.

A lot of the requisite pieces were available online (chiefly through Etsy) and merely had to be assembled - the hat serving as headpiece and the scale-patterned shirt and tights (which regrettably didn't show up very well in photos). But two of the items had to be made from scratch: the seaweed-patterned shorts and the tail.

Irvin invested in scale-patterned fabric in different colors, and then put his faith in his sewing machine. He'd never made shorts from scratch, and they proved difficult indeed - they seemed very doable, up until he tried to move in them and realized there needed to be a lot more give in the thighs. Eventually, the shorts were completed, though sudden sprawling movements remained inadvisable.

Much harder was the tail - and more particularly, the blue fins. In order to give them their shape, Irvin used vinyl fabric on cardboard. The problem was fitting them into the seam of the tail, since layers of vinyl and cardboard seemed beyond the capabilities of the sewing machine. Irvin opted to use hot glue, which worked well and looked really good... up until Irvin began walking with the tail on. He'd made it about two blocks before the tail completely fell apart.

Irvin had to use all of his biggest safety pins to keep the tail together somehow - and to their credit, the tail remained mostly intact throughout the night, though the lower fin defeated all attempts at attachment at the end of the Halloween parade and had to be retired.

The enormous slippers seemed like they would be incredibly comfortable - and they were much more comfortable than many alternatives, but they also provided a very flimsy barrier between Irvin's feet and every pebble, rock, and cobblestone of New York City.

After a year and half of pandemic, Irvin (and all of NYC) had a lot of pent-up Halloween energy. Irvin got a group of friends together to march in the parade, as always, and it was a glorious night. Many people were thrilled to see a Luca costume, with frequent refrains about how much they loved the movie - far more than Irvin did, apparently. He did not see any other Luca costumes that night, somewhat surprisingly. In a departure from his usual kid-scarring antics, many children were delighted by the Luca costume. Irvin spent the whole night yelling "Silencio Bruno!" to the cheers of children.